TIJUANA  The Mexican military on Wednesday announced the capture of a suspected longtime drug trafficker linked to a 10-ton cocaine shipment found in the state of Baja California Sur in 1995.

Julio César Salas Reyes, known as El M-4 or El Pilli, was detained on Monday in Tijuana, according to a statement from the Mexican Defense Secretariat in Mexico City. In his possession were a high-caliber rifle, three handguns, ammunition, a vehicle and communications equipment.

The military statement said Salas is connected to an incident that occurred on Nov. 5, 1995 at the southern end of Baja California Sur, where authorities found a passenger airplane carrying 10 tons of cocaine on a dry lake bed near the Pacific Ocean. The shipment was said to have belonged to the Arellano Félix Organization, known as the AFO, named for the brothers that ran it for years.

Salas had worked as an assassin in the organization, reporting to an AFO lieutenant known as Efraín Pérez Areciniega, who was arrested in Tijuana in 2004 and extradited to the United States in 2009, the statement from the military said. He allegedly also had been close to two other members of the organization, Javier Arellano Félix, detained in 2006, and Juan Francisco Sillas Rocha, arrested in 2011.

Salas had been wanted by Mexican authorities on charges of organized crime, drug trafficking and use of clandestine landing strips, the statement said. He has been turned over to the SIEDO, the organized crime unit of Mexican Attorney General’s Office.

Though decimated by the arrests and deaths of its original leaders, authorities say that the AFO has continued to operate under the leadership of an Arellano nephew named Fernando Sánchez Arellano.